During the construction
of this website about Oradour-sur-Glane and its subsequent maintenance since it first opened on 10th March 2000, it has become
apparent that certain words associated with the events surrounding
Oradour have and still do, cause confusion as to their correct
spelling. This short list shows the true spellings using British English on the left of the page in
Navy text, along with their common misspellings to the right. See the FAQ list
for some pronunciation details.

At the foot of this
page is a list of the ALT codes needed on a UK English language keyboard to be
able to print the various accents and umlauts used in both French and German
words on this website.

Pronunciation details:

For guidance on how to pronounce some of the names, both
French and German mentioned in this website, see
FAQ5

European
date convention:

The date convention
used throughout this website is that of Britain, France and Germany, so that
10-6-1944 means the 10th of June 1944 and not October 6th 1944. It is noteworthy
that official documents written within the US military should also follow the
British, French and German date convention; why this is I do not know.

English
spelling convention:

All the English
language spelling used on this website follows British English conventions, not
American English; for example, "centre" not "center",
"honour" not "honor",
"colour" not "color", "armour" not
"armor"
and "favourites" not "favorites" (except for the reference to the
favicon on the page dealing with The Favicon for this
website which follows the Microsoft American spelling).

Commonly
misspelled words:

Diekmann
..... Dickmann, or Dieckmann, or Dikmann (these four spellings are common in the
literature of Oradour and indeed Diekmann, Dickmann, Dieckmann and Dikmann are all valid
surnames, as the reading of a German telephone directory will quickly show).

Führer .....
Fuhrer, or Fuehrer (the latter spelling shows the correct spelling without
using the special umlaut ü character, which can be had by holding down the ALT key
and entering 129 on the numeric keypad: see "Accents" below for more details)

Kämpfe .....
Kampfe, or Kaempfe (the latter spelling is an attempt to give the correct
pronunciation without the ä umlaut, which can had by holding down the ALT key and entering 132 on
the numeric keypad).

Centre de la Mémoire
..... Centre de la Memoire (the é accent is given by holding down the ALT key
and entering 130 on the numeric keypad).

Oradour-sur-Glane
..... Oradour sur Glane (I am taking the spelling and punctuation from the Michelin maps and
guides as being correct and they show it with the hyphens. The
literature from the Centre de la Mémoire in Oradour itself shows it with
the hyphens, although it seems quite common for authors, even French ones, to
spell it without).

Accents:

Keyboard codes for French
and German characters used on this website. To use these codes, hold down the ALT key
to the right of the spacebar and enter the number shown using the Numeric Keypad
(not the number keys along the top of the keyboard).

German characters ...

ä ..... ALT+132
Ä ..... ALT+142

ö ..... ALT+148
Ö ..... ALT+153

ü ..... ALT+129
Ü ..... ALT+154

It is worth noting that the umlauts are just a short-cut way
of writing two characters in one, namely, ä for ae, ö for oe and ü for ue. This
means that German can be typed correctly on a keyboard which does not have the
special characters (such as an Enigma code machine for example).

ß ..... ALT+225 (This character is called the, "Eszett" and
is used as a shorthand way of showing what would otherwise be a double "s" in written German). Note: this is not the same as
the "Sig runes" used to denote the "SS", and as
displayed in the, "Waffen-SS". The Sig Runes were never abbreviated
as, "ß" and
were always shown written out in full as, "SS".

French characters ...

é ..... ALT+130
è ..... ALT+138 (In French it is common to write capital
letters without accents).

There are many more French accents that
those shown above, if you want any more, do a search on Google or Yahoo! (or
your favourite search engine) using the words "French Accents" and you will find
plenty of websites detailing all the subtleties.